or the agreement of the community, one of the bases of Islamic religious law)
to public opinion (Hourani 1983 , 144 ). Paradoxically, then, both al-Afghani
and ‘Abduh’s attempt to identify a transcendent Islamic essence beyond the
world of appearances can only be understood in terms of particular historical
and political circumstances, and is itself the product of multiple cultural
inXuences.
3 Islamic Fundamentalism
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
For Islamist (also called Islamic fundamentalist) 8 thinkers such as Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989 ) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966 ), such modernist
attempts to render Islam compatible with a set of Western achievements
and standards are not a help to theummabut both cause and consequence
of its continuing decay. As Qutb contends, such arguments are no more than
defensive attempts to justify the relevance of Islam given the obscurantism of
Muslim scholars on the one hand and attacks from Western and Eastern
secularists on the other (Qutb 1962 , 17 – 20 ). Implicit in such apologetics, Qutb
argues, is that Islam is on trial because it is somehow ‘‘guilty’’ and in need of
justiWcation. According to Khomeini, such ‘‘xenomaniacs’’ have been seduced
by the technological and material achievements of the imperialists. By betray-
ing Islam from within, they deepen and exacerbate the subservience of Islam
to Western power (Khomeini 1981 , 38 , 35 ).
By contrast, for Khomeini and Qutb, modernity as deWned and universal-
ized by Western culture and power is a kind of global pathology, a disease that
at once degrades the true essence of Islam and Muslims’ capacity to recognize
their illness. Central to this pathology is modern rationalism, where reason
not only determines the methods by which humans can know the world but
also deWnes what is worth knowing in terms of what is knowable to human
beings. Whereas ‘Abduh and al-Afghani largely took such rationalism as a fact
to which Muslims must adjust themselves, Islamist thinkers emphasize the
8 Because the term ‘‘fundamentalism’’ is so widely recognized, I use it interchangeably with
‘‘Islamism,’’ but it is understandably controversial to use a term coined to describe a turn-of-the-
century Christian movement in America in connection with Islam (Euben 1999 ).
modern and contemporary islamic political theory 303